Thomas Oliver: Climate bills are economic engine killers

By Thomas Oliver

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

If you thought the debate about health care was surreal, then don’t throw away those 3-D glasses, because you’ll need them to have any shot at understanding the cap and trade bills now making their way through the corridors of Congress.

When David Ratcliffe says the result could be awful, you need to know how understated the chief executive of the Southern Co. usually is. When he tells the Atlanta Rotary Club he hopes the legislation might become more reasonable, you need to note he didn’t say reasonable; he said more reasonable.

There is hardly anything reasonable in either the House version, which barely won out over the bipartisan effort against it, or the Senate version that passed out of committee on a one-party vote.

The Georgia Chamber of Commerce says the House bill could cut Georgia’s gross state product by more than $4.5 billion and decrease our personal income by more than $5.5 billion in its first year, before it’s fully implemented.

Ryan Mahoney, director of public policy for the chamber, says these bills slam the economy at every level. “From the production, distribution and sale of goods, down to home heating costs.”

Mahoney said there isn’t a lot of difference between the two bills.

For example: the House version requires a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020. The Senate, 20 percent.

Steven Hayward of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute says we haven’t seen such a level since 1977, when our economy was half its size. To meet that standard, we’d have to drastically cut our use of fossil fuels and replace that energy with low-carbon energy.

Sounds great. Except, the lower carbon sources favored by the ruling class are way more expensive.

Wind and solar are three times more expensive. Plus, those two forms of energy are nowhere near developed enough to supply more than a fraction of our needs.

Here in the South, wind and solar are little more than wishful thinking and personal projects. We have no shot at developing a wind industry and our humidity detracts from generating much in the way of solar.

Although nuclear and hydropower add not one iota of C02 to the atmosphere, they aren’t acceptable to those who would have us believe the Earth will end in fire. Nuclear is too scary. Hydro requires dams. Dams bad.

Which proves we are neither reasonable nor serious when it comes to our energy policy.

Politics, not science, dictates our energy policy. That, not any lack of natural resources, is why we are energy-dependent.

All of this despite the fact that the Earth’s temperature has stabilized in the last decade, contrary to all the predictions of doom, and may actually cool over for the next decade or more. The ruling party isn’t about to let facts or a historic recession slow down their reshaping of the world.

Combined with the onerous taxes imbedded in the health care legislation, the costs of the remaking of our energy industry will all but guarantee the end of any recovery.

Thomas Oliver writes the Sunday business column. He can be reached at toliver.writeright@gmail.com